Part 1: A blogger conference call with Howard Dean: “…the next state on my list is Texas.”

Part 2:

…Question: Hi Governor Dean. I was just wondering, you know, as you’re preparing to move on from the DNC if you, you know, have any preferences as to who you’d like to be as the next chairman, and, and the advice for that person, and, and also what you see as the future of the fifty state strategy under your successor and your own personal plans for [crosstalk]…

Howard Dean: Well, you know, I, I’ve done a transition memo for the Obama folks, so I know I’m not going to publicly say what’s in the transition memo, but I think I can broadly outline. First of all, the Obama campaign used a fifty state strategy in order to win this election. He, he had an office in places like Utah, which everybody knew we weren’t gonna win. So it’s extraordinary what he has done, not just for the country, but the Democratic Party. And I have no doubt that that will continue with the new chair. I don’t have an advice for a specific person for the new chair. I do believe that the party gets run differently when you have an incumbent Democratic president. I think he ought to have a person who’s very loyal to him as the executive director, because that’s where the decisions are really going to be made. And he will run the party, through his people, for the next four years, and hopefully the next eight years. And I think I guess that’s about all I can say, but I have every confidence that the fifty state strategy will continue and the map will be expanded even further in 2010 and 2012…

…Question: Hey Howard.

Howard Dean: Hi.

Question: Hey, I, I blog out of New Orleans and we have a kind of special difficult circumstances here. And we’re in a deep red state. I’m curious as to how the fifty state, state strategy over the next couple years may make inroads in red states where Democratic Party infrastructures have been a hindrance.

Howard Dean: Well, in, the, the, in New Orleans, in Louisiana we don’t think the Democratic, there are some states where the Democratic party structure is a hindrance, but Louisiana is not one of them. The problem with Louisiana is because of Katrina. We basically had to support their party in ways that we didn’t have to do for anybody else. And, that, their, their difficulty, again, with Democratic poli..Party politics in Louisiana is it’s very hard to get the capacity to run the party without having, having a governor, and without having the ability that you have when you’re, in, in sort of a stable situation. I don’t think politically Louisiana has been a particularly stable situation since Katrina. What with the huge population changes and, and the change in the political climate because of the reaction to Katrina. That doesn’t mean we’re gonna give up on Louisiana. We’re not. I actually took a bus tour through Louisiana before we even decided which states were gonna be in the mix and I…Louisiana and Mississippi were two states that we thought might be in the mix. So, we’ll, that is, but you’re right, Louisiana is a special circumstance which is gonna require some special attention and we’ve done some of that but clearly there’s gonna have to be more of that from the next DNC chair…

…Question: Governor Dean, here in New Mexico we had a big swing this year and in votes, in votes, especially among Hispanics. I was wondering what kind of outreach you guys did specifically for Hispanics [crosstalk]…

Howard Dean: We had the largest Hispanic outreach in the history of the Democratic Party. I think we spent twenty million to start with, and more than that, reaching out to Hispanics all over the country. And a lot of it was the thing that you expect, Spanish language TV and newspaper and radio. Interviews. But we had an enormous number of Latino organizers on the ground in these key states making contact with, with prospective voters. Florida was the other place where we just spent enormous amount of money, time, and effort in the Hispanic population. Organizing in the community, in ways that I think have never been done before. We started, actually, before we knew who the nominee was gonna be. A couple of years ago I reached out to Hispanic evangelical ministers, Protestant ministers, who had been meeting with Bush, partly because of the faith based outreach. But immigration allowed us the opening to begin to talk with them and some of them have become our friends and they worked very hard for the Democratic ticket within the bounds of their tax exempt requirements. And that was a huge help to us. And so we did get big assist from the Republican immigration language. It wasn’t so much the policy but the language that they used to discuss American citizens who were Hispanic, let alone immigrants…

…Question: Hi, Governor Dean, happy birthday by the way.

Howard Dean: Thank you.

Question: How frustrating is it for you as DNC chair, with West Virginia, where every office from the governor on down is pretty much controlled by the Democrats, but we’ve lost the last three presidential elections. And what can be done about that?

Howard Dean: Well, actually, it’s much better to be in a position of West Virginia than it is, say, in Alabama where you have a Republican governor. We’ve got a great Democratic governor and Democratic office holders and now we’ve just got to figure out how to translate that into winning the presidency. We came back. We were way behind, we came back, hey Joe Biden made a last minute visit to West Virginia. So West Virginia is one of those states like Texas we just got, we can, we can keep working at it and we can win it again. And when we do, the whole political dynamic will have changed. This is it again, a generational shift that’s going on in West Virginia and, and other parts of Appalachia. And I think we just gotta work our way through it and keep working hard. But I don’t, I don’t, it’s not, West Virginia is not the least bit frustrating to me. I, I was very pleased by what happened in West Virginia. We didn’t win, but we really closed the gap in the last couple of weeks. And that means that the momentum will be with us in the next election…

…I just want to say thank you all. Look forward to, hopefully, seeing you all in person one of these, maybe at the convention, the Netroots convention next year…